What is an AI Engineer at Ramp?

At Ramp, the role of an AI Engineer is not about theoretical research or training massive foundation models in a vacuum. It is about application, velocity, and tangible business impact. You are joining a team that believes AI is the new foundation for how business gets done. Whether you are in the Applied AI engineering track or the AI Operations/Enablement track, your goal is the same: to leverage Large Language Models (LLMs) and automation to save companies time and money, and to make Ramp the most productive company in the world.

In this role, you will work on the cutting edge of financial technology. You might be building AI Agents that autonomously handle procurement, designing Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems to answer complex policy questions, or developing structured extraction tools (like Ramp's open-source jsonformer) to turn messy documents into clean data. Alternatively, you may be focused on internal enablement, deploying workflows using tools like Gumloop and n8n to supercharge the productivity of Ramp's non-engineering teams.

This position is critical because Ramp operates at a massive scale, processing billions in transaction volume. You are expected to be a "vibe coder," a product owner, and a technical expert all in one. You will ship full-stack projects end-to-end, often moving from idea to production in days, not months. If you are bold enough to build the future of finance and prefer hands-on delivery over strategy briefings, this is the environment for you.

Getting Ready for Your Interviews

Preparing for an interview at Ramp requires a shift in mindset. You need to demonstrate not just that you can code, but that you can build useful products quickly and pragmatically. The process is competitive and often automated in the early stages to filter for high technical competence.

Key Evaluation Criteria:

• Applied Technical Fluency – You must demonstrate the ability to use AI tools (LLMs, APIs, Vector DBs) and standard engineering stacks (Python, Typescript, SQL) to solve real problems. We look for builders who understand the limitations of current models and how to engineer around them.
• Operational Velocity – Ramp is famous for its speed. Interviewers assess whether you can ship high-quality work fast. Perfectionism that hinders progress is viewed negatively; pragmatic, rapid iteration is valued.
• Product & Operational Empathy – particularly for the Enablement roles, you need to understand the "business" side. Can you map a chaotic human process and automate it? Do you understand the user's pain point?
• Problem Solving under Ambiguity – You will often be given open-ended problems (e.g., "How would you automate invoice processing?"). You need to structure your answer logically, defining the inputs, the processing logic, and the outputs clearly.

Interview Process Overview

The interview process for AI Engineering roles at Ramp is rigorous, efficient, and heavily focused on technical execution. Candidates should expect a process that moves quickly but demands a high standard of performance right from the start. Unlike traditional big tech companies that may focus heavily on whiteboard theory, Ramp focuses on your ability to use tools to build solutions.

The process typically begins with an Online Assessment (OA) or a one-way video interview. Recent candidates report that the coding challenges are often hosted on platforms like HackerRank and can range from Medium to Hard difficulty. Note that the screening is strict; even a perfect score on the coding assessment does not guarantee a next round if your resume or project portfolio does not align perfectly with the team's immediate needs.

If you pass the initial automated screens, you will move to technical deep dives. These may involve live coding sessions, system design discussions focused on AI infrastructure (e.g., RAG, inference), or practical automation challenges. The final stages involve meeting with engineering leaders and potential teammates to assess "Ramp speed" and cultural alignment. The entire loop is designed to identify self-starters who can operate autonomously.

Understanding the Timeline: The visual timeline above illustrates the typical flow from application to offer. Note the emphasis on the initial "Screening & Assessment" phase; this is where the highest volume of candidates are filtered out, often via automated coding tests or one-way video responses. Candidates should treat these asynchronous steps with the same seriousness as a live interview.

Deep Dive into Evaluation Areas

Ramp evaluates AI Engineers on a mix of core software engineering fundamentals and specific applied AI capabilities. Because the team is lean and moves fast, there is little room for "learning on the job" regarding the fundamentals.

Coding & Algorithms

Despite being an AI role, strong foundational coding skills are non-negotiable. You will face automated assessments that test your ability to write clean, efficient code under time pressure.

• Data Structures: Expect questions involving arrays, hashmaps, and trees.
• Complexity: You must be able to analyze Time and Space complexity.
• Practical Scripting: For Ops/Enablement roles, you may be tested on your ability to write scripts to glue APIs together.

Applied AI & LLM Systems

This is the core of the role. You need to know how to take an off-the-shelf model and make it work for production use cases.

• RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation): Understanding how to chunk data, generate embeddings, and retrieve relevant context for an LLM.
• Structured Output: How to force an LLM to output valid JSON or SQL (a key focus for Ramp).
• Prompt Engineering & Chaining: Experience with tools like LangChain or building custom chains to handle complex logic.
• Agents: Designing systems where the AI can take actions (e.g., browsing the web, querying a database) rather than just answering questions.

System Design & Infrastructure

For the "Applied AI Engineer" track, you must understand the backend systems that support AI.

• Inference Architecture: How to serve models with low latency.
• Integration: Connecting AI services to existing web frameworks and databases.
• Scalability: Handling rate limits, cost management for API calls, and queuing systems.

Operational Automation (Enablement Focus)

For "AI Operations" roles, the evaluation shifts toward process logic and low-code tools.

• Workflow Orchestration: Using tools like n8n or Gumloop to build complex logic flows.
• Process Mapping: Taking a vague business requirement (e.g., "Automate support tickets") and breaking it down into a step-by-step algorithmic workflow.

Be ready to go over:

• Structured Extraction: Techniques for getting reliable data out of unstructured text (PDFs, invoices).
• Evaluation: How do you measure if your AI feature is actually working? (Evals, Golden Datasets).
• Tool Usage: Specific experience with Cursor, Claude Code, or OpenAI APIs.
• Advanced concepts: Fine-tuning models vs. few-shot prompting; Vector database selection (Pinecone, Milvus, etc.).

Example questions or scenarios:

• "Given a raw invoice PDF, how would you design a pipeline to extract the Vendor Name, Date, and Total Amount with 100% schema compliance?"
• "We want to build a chatbot that answers employee questions about HR benefits. How do you architect this so it doesn't hallucinate?"
• "Write a function to traverse a dependency graph of tasks." (Standard coding question).

Key Responsibilities

As an AI Engineer at Ramp, your day-to-day work is a blend of software engineering, product experimentation, and rapid prototyping. You are responsible for shipping full-stack AI projects end-to-end. This means you aren't just writing the prompt; you are building the backend API, setting up the database, and often touching the frontend UI to ensure the user experience is seamless.

You will likely be working on high-visibility projects such as AI Agents that automate complex financial workflows or internal tooling that helps Ramp's customer-facing teams answer queries faster. A significant part of the role involves infrastructure, such as building components for LLM inference or fine-tuning models to better understand financial data.

For those in the AI Operations/Enablement track, your responsibilities include deploying dozens of AI-driven automations across non-engineering teams. You will act as a bridge between technology and business, mapping processes and building workflows using a mix of code and low-code tools (Gumloop, n8n). You are expected to seed an "AI-native culture" by enabling hundreds of team members to use these workflows daily.

Role Requirements & Qualifications

Ramp looks for a specific breed of engineer: highly technical, autonomous, and product-minded.

Must-have skills:

• Full-Stack Proficiency: Strong command of backend systems (Python, Node.js) and web frameworks. You must be able to build the "wrapper" around the AI.
• Applied AI Experience: Demonstrated history of shipping products using LLMs (GPT-4, Claude, Llama). You should have projects where you moved beyond a simple chat interface to complex logical flows.
• Engineering Rigor: Experience with CI/CD, version control, and writing production-grade code.
• Data Fluency: SQL, BI tools, and experience handling unstructured data.

Nice-to-have skills:

• Fintech Domain Knowledge: Familiarity with payments, invoices, or risk workflows.
• Low-Code Expertise: For operations roles, deep knowledge of n8n, Zapier, or Gumloop is a major plus.
• Open Source Contributions: Contributions to AI libraries (like jsonformer or others) catch the team's eye.

Experience Level:

• Typically 2–5+ years of experience in engineering, product management, or technical program management.
• A track record of high ownership—you should be able to point to features you built and shipped solo or as a lead.

Common Interview Questions

The following questions reflect the types of challenges you will face. They are drawn from candidate data and the specific technical requirements of the role. Expect a mix of standard coding problems and open-ended AI design questions.

Technical & Coding

These questions test your raw engineering ability.

• "Given a list of transactions, identify potential duplicates based on fuzzy matching logic."
• "Solve a customized version of the 'Meeting Rooms' or 'Merge Intervals' problem."
• "Implement a parser that extracts specific fields from a messy JSON object."
• "Write a script to rate-limit API requests to an external LLM provider."

Applied AI & System Design

These questions test your ability to build AI products.

• "How would you build a system to automatically categorize thousands of credit card transactions? Which model would you use and why?"
• "Design a RAG system for a legal document repository. How do you handle chunking? How do you handle updates to the documents?"
• "We are seeing high latency in our AI chatbot. Walk me through how you would debug and optimize this."
• "How do you prevent an LLM from outputting PII (Personally Identifiable Information) in a customer support response?"

Behavioral & Operational

Ramp cares deeply about how you work.

• "Tell me about a time you automated a manual process. What was the impact in terms of hours saved?"
• "Describe a situation where you had to ship a feature in under a week. How did you manage the trade-offs?"
• "How do you convince a non-technical stakeholder to adopt a new AI workflow you built?"

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Is this a research role or an engineering role? This is strictly an Applied role. If you prefer reading papers and training foundation models from scratch, this is likely not the right fit. Ramp focuses on using existing state-of-the-art models to solve business problems immediately.

Q: What is the "Online Assessment" like? Candidates report it is challenging, often hosted on platforms like HackerRank. It typically consists of 2 coding questions ranging from LeetCode Medium to Hard. Speed and correctness are both critical.

Q: How does Ramp view remote work? Ramp has major hubs in New York and San Francisco. While they are flexible, there is a strong preference for being near the hubs to facilitate the high-velocity, collaborative culture they are building.

Q: Why might I be rejected even with a perfect coding score? Ramp receives a high volume of applications. A perfect score on the OA is a baseline requirement, not a guarantee. Rejections often happen if the candidate's past projects don't demonstrate enough "builder" energy or if their experience is too theoretical compared to the practical needs of the team.

Q: What tools should I be familiar with? For the engineering track: Python, TypeScript, Vector DBs, OpenAI/Anthropic APIs. For the operations track: Gumloop, n8n, Notion, SQL, and Cursor.

Other General Tips

• Speed is a Feature: In your behavioral answers, emphasize velocity. Ramp prides itself on shipping faster than incumbents. Stories about multi-month research projects are less impressive than stories about shipping a prototype in a weekend that solved a real user problem.
• Show, Don't Just Tell: If you have side projects, GitHub repos, or live demos of AI tools you've built, highlight them. Ramp values "vibe coders" who tinker and build for fun.
• Be Pragmatic about AI: Don't hype up AI. Be honest about hallucinations, latency, and cost. Show that you know when not to use AI and when a simple regex or SQL query is better.
• Understand the Business: Ramp is a fintech company. Understanding the concepts of invoices, procurement, and ledger management will help you contextualize your system design answers.

Summary & Next Steps

The AI Engineer role at Ramp is one of the most high-impact positions available in fintech today. You are not just a cog in a machine; you are an architect of the company's future productivity and product capability. Whether you are building the infrastructure that powers LLM inference or designing the workflows that automate internal operations, your work will directly contribute to Ramp's mission of saving businesses time and money.

To succeed, focus your preparation on practical coding proficiency and applied AI system design. Be ready to prove you can build, ship, and iterate at a blistering pace. Review the basics of RAG, structured output, and API integration, and ensure your coding fundamentals are sharp enough to pass the initial rigorous screens.

Interpreting the Data: The compensation for this role is highly competitive, reflecting the high bar for talent. The wide range ($114k - $340k across different levels and locations) indicates that Ramp hires for various levels of seniority, from mid-level contributors to principal engineers. Your specific offer will depend heavily on your location (NYC/SF) and your demonstrated ability to ship production-ready AI systems.

You have the roadmap. Now, go build something great. Good luck!